Transmutations of capitals in canada
a "social space" approach
pp. 61-73
in: Karen Róbson, Chris Sanders (eds), Quantifying theory, Berlin, Springer, 2009Abstract
Transmutations of capitals refer to processes whereby one form of capital gets converted into another. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu extensively theorized capital conversions in a book chapter entitled "The forms of capital" and empirically investigated them in his magnum opus, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Bourdieu's perspective on conversions between capitals has since proven to be extremely influential in related research around the globe. Bourdieu explicitly adopted a relational, field-theoretic approach to causality rather than a linear one. Statistical techniques such as regression modeling that complement a linear-causal perspective, however, do not complement a relational worldview, implying that much of the research inspired by Bourdieu is not truly consistent with his theoretical approach. By applying relational statistical techniques to survey data from Canada I attempt here to produce a rare analysis of capital conversions that is analytically faithful to Bourdieu's relational perspective, eschewing linear modeling and consideration of independent and dependent variables and linear relations of causality between them.
